Babylon: Pergamonmuseum, Room 9

In a museum in Berlin, school groups file past the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. It is a serious piece of work: almost seventeen metres high, reconstructed from the original glazed bricks excavated between 1899 and 1917, deep blue lapis lazuli colour with bas-relief dragons and bulls marching in repeating procession. The children look up. A few photograph it. The guide explains who built it and when, and the group moves on to the next room. This is the Pergamonmuseum - or rather, it was, until October 2023, when it closed for renovation. The gate is currently behind hoardings while the south wing is rebuilt; it is expected back on display in the 2030s. Babylon, then, is in storage.

It has been in stranger places.

Babylon was the empire of Nebuchadnezzar II, the city on the Euphrates that stood at the centre of the ancient world in the sixth century BCE. In 597 BCE Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem for the first time and took its king into captivity. In 586 BCE he came back, broke the walls, burned the Temple, and marched the bulk of Judah's population to Babylon. This was standard Babylonian policy for managing conquered peoples: remove the leadership class, relocate them, dissolve the community before it can reconstitute itself. It had worked before.

With the Jews, it didn't quite work the way Babylon intended.

What you invent when you can't go home

The problem the exile created was a genuine one: how do you maintain a religion, a community, an identity, when the place that anchors it is rubble and the object at its centre - the Temple, the ark, the sacrificial cult - is gone? The priests had their procedures; the procedures required a building; the building was in ruins a thousand miles away. The whole apparatus had been designed for a specific location. The location was unavailable.

The answer the exiled community worked out over the following decades was one of the most consequential improvisations in religious history: you carry the practice in a text. You write down what was done in the Temple and how and why. You teach those texts to children. You gather on the Sabbath not to sacrifice but to study and to pray. The building is lost; the tradition survives because it has been transferred, by an act of collective intellectual will, from stone to scroll.

This is the thing Babylon invented without meaning to. The portable synagogue - assembly, study, prayer, no building required - is a direct consequence of a military campaign that was meant to end the tribe. The exile that Nebuchadnezzar designed as a dissolution became the workshop in which Judaism learned to travel. When Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and told the exiles they could go home, many of them did. But the technology they'd developed - the book, the portable practice, the community that reconstitutes itself around a text rather than a place - went everywhere with them. It is still going.

Two and a half thousand years later, a Jewish family can set up a Passover seder table anywhere on earth - a kitchen in Manchester, a borrowed room in Shanghai, a grandmother's apartment in Buenos Aires - and run the same service, from the same book, in the same order, with the same songs and the same argument about when to eat. That architecture was prototyped in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar funded the research.

What's left of each

Babylon the city exists as a series of excavated mounds on the Euphrates plain south of Baghdad. The palaces are exposed foundations. The Hanging Gardens, if they were ever there, are a subject of scholarly disagreement. The ziggurat of Marduk - the Etemenanki, possibly the origin of the Tower of Babel story - is a square depression in the earth. What can be seen of Nebuchadnezzar's capital is scattered between Berlin, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, and a dozen other collections. The most spectacular single piece is in a crate in a Berlin museum undergoing renovation.

The community Babylon exiled is, by any reasonable count, doing better. The texts written and compiled and argued over during and after the exile - the books of the prophets, the edited histories, the Psalms including the one that weeps by the rivers - form the foundation of a library that has never stopped being read. The Talmud, compiled in the same Babylonian region six centuries after the first exile, runs to thirty-seven tractates and is studied daily by hundreds of thousands of people on a seven-and-a-half-year cycle. The practice of gathering in community to study, pray, and argue without a Temple - invented under duress in Babylon - is the model for every synagogue, church, and mosque in the world. Nebuchadnezzar, whether he knew it or not, ran a very productive research programme.

The glass case in Berlin

There is something to be said about the choice of city, and it will be said briefly. Berlin is not a neutral location for a museum holding the monuments of an empire that destroyed Jerusalem and exiled the Jewish people. The city is aware of this - the particular weight of a German institution housing both the gate of Babylon and, until 2023 in the same building complex, the Pergamon Altar, and presenting all of it as the heritage of universal antiquity. The Vorderasiatisches Museum holds these objects with serious scholarship. The fact that the objects are there at all, rather than in Baghdad or Jerusalem, is a consequence of nineteenth-century excavation practices that are now contested in the field and in the courts. That argument belongs to another piece. Here it is enough to note that the glass case stands in Berlin, and that this is not an unremarkable fact.

What is remarkable - and this is the piece's real subject - is the proportion. Babylon is the gate in the museum, the tablets in the archive, the foundations in the Iraqi plain. The people Babylon exiled are the ones who kept writing. By the rivers of Babylon they sat down and wept, and then they picked up a stylus, or a reed pen, or eventually a printing press, and they wrote it all down. That is what happened. The record is, by now, considerably longer than the empire's.

School groups file past. They look up at the gate. They move on to the next room. Somewhere in that group there is a child who will have a Passover seder next spring, from a book that exists because Nebuchadnezzar burned Jerusalem - and who will not think about that connection once during the entire meal, which is precisely how a thing becomes a tradition.